Bladder cancer is a heterogeneous disease, with 70% of patients presenting with superficial tumours, which tend to recur but are generally not life threatening, and 30% presenting as muscle-invasive disease associated with a high risk of death from distant metastases. The main presenting symptom of all bladder cancers is painless haematuria, and the diagnosis is established by urinary cytology and transurethral tumour resection. Intravesical treatment is used for carcinoma in situ and other high grade non-muscle-invasive tumours. The standard of care for muscle-invasive disease is radical cystoprostatectomy, and several types of urinary diversions are offered to patients, with quality of life as an important consideration. Bladder preservation with transurethral tumour resection, radiation, and chemotherapy can in some cases be equally curative. Several chemotherapeutic agents have proven to be useful as neoadjuvant or adjuvant treatment and in patients with metastatic disease. We discuss bladder preserving approaches, combination chemotherapy including new agents, targeted therapies, and advances in molecular biology.

No abstract

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) occurs in 2-4% of patients with tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC). Previous reports have noted a variety of histologic appearances in these cancers, but the full spectrum of morphologic and molecular features has not been fully elucidated. We encountered 46 renal epithelial neoplasms from 19 TSC patients and analyzed their clinical, pathological and molecular features, enabling separation of these 46 tumors into three groups. The largest subset of tumors (n=24) had a distinct morphological, immunological and molecular profile, including prominent papillary architecture and uniformly deficient SDHB expression prompting the novel term “TSC-associated papillary RCC.” The second group (n=15) was morphologically similar to a hybrid oncocytic/chromophobe tumor (HOCT) while the last 7 renal epithelial neoplasms of group 3 remained unclassifiable. The TSC-associated papillary RCCs (PRCC) had prominent papillary architecture lined by clear cells with delicate eosinophilic cytoplasmic thread-like strands that occasionally appeared more prominent and aggregated to form eosinophilic globules. All 24 (100%) of these tumors were the International Society of Urological Pathology (ISUP) nucleolar grade 2 or 3 with mostly basally located nuclei. Tumor cells from 17 of 24 TSC-associated PRCC showed strong, diffuse labeling for CA-IX (100%), CK7 (94%), vimentin (88%), CD10 (83%), and were uniformly negative for succinate dehydrogenase subunit B (SDHB), TFE3 and AMACR. Gains of chromosomes 7 and 17 were found in 2 tumors, whereas chromosome 3p deletion and TFE3 translocations were not detected. In this study, we reported a sizable cohort of renal tumors seen in TSC and were able to identify them as different morphotypes which may help to expand the morphologic spectrum of TSC-associated RCC.

No abstract

No abstract